Dutch art museum heist: Are thieves in it for the money or the Monet?

This week, thieves raided a museum in Holland, making off with paintings from artists like Matisse and Gaugin. Metro examines the latest in a long list of heists and asks art security experts if pinching a Picasso is really worth it.

Otherwise, why would they go to such lengths to steal some of the world’s most expensive paintings?

Security experts from the art world insist the criminals who stole a number of works from a Dutch museum this week have little chance of making substantial amounts of cash from selling them elsewhere. In fact, they will have to be extremely fortunate to find a buyer in the first place.

Seven paintings were taken from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam on Tuesday morning, including pieces of art by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Gaugin and Lucien Freud. The thieves are being hunted by Dutch police. It emerged yesterday that no guards were on duty during the theft as the museum relied on security cameras and an alarm system.

The raid is the latest in a long line of high-profile thefts of highly valuable artwork from museums and galleries in Europe and the US.

The paintings are estimated to have a combined worth of up to £100m if bought legitimately. Ironically, as soon as the thieves took the paintings, their value immediately decreased by as much as 95 per cent.

Alice Farren-Bradley, recoveries case manager at the Art Loss Register in London, which compiles the largest private database of stolen artwork in the world, said those behind the theft will be fortunate to recoup more than five per cent of the actual worth of the paintings on the black market.

‘It’s going to be almost impossible to sell these on,’ she told Metro. ‘For any kind of trade or transfer of these paintings, the money is going to be an absolute fraction of their fair market value.’

Founded in 1991, the Art Loss Register works with police forces all over the world to recover stolen art and antiques and has more than 360,000 items on its database. More than 1,200 of them belong to Picasso, who is far and away the most popular painter among art thieves.

It has tagged the paintings stolen in Rotterdam, making moving them or selling them a tricky proposition for those who took them.

‘Most of the time in our cases we find the criminals put a lot of thought into the actual theft and a lot less thought if any into how to actually dispose of the items,’ said Ms Farren-Bradley.

Robert Wittman created the FBI’s Art Crime Team and is the author of Priceless: How I Went Undercover To Rescue The World’s Stolen Treasures.

He worked on several sting operations during his time at the FBI to recover stolen art – on one such operation in 2005 he recovered a Rembrandt painting from a hotel in Copenhagen which had been taken in a robbery from Stockholm’s National Museum of Fine Arts in 2000. Thieves used machine guns and bombs in the raid before escaping on a speedboat.

He told Metro that those behind past high-profile art thefts are not the specialists we see depicted in movies.

He said: ‘Throughout my 20 years in the FBI I recovered $300m worth of this kind of material and infiltrated many different groups in Spain, Sweden and France – the thieves we always dealt with were not art thieves. They’re common criminals. It just so happened their last job was an art job. But mostly they would be robbing a liquor store.

‘I wouldn’t even say they’re experts in museum heists. They’re experts at defeating an alarm and getting in and out quickly.’

Mr Wittman said this latest criminal group was no different.

‘There were some mistakes made. They did set off an alarm so they knew there was going to be some sort of response. I don’t see this as a group of art historians. I see this as your typical local art thieves.

‘In my experience of this the individuals that were involved in these cases were very good criminals, but they were terrible businessmen.’

It seems almost inconceivable that criminal gangs don’t have a buyer set up before stealing the art, but Mr Wittman said this was the norm.

‘They don’t think about the fact that these pieces are identified, they’re well known. The only reason they’re worth what they’re worth is because they have authenticity, they have provenance and they have legal title. If you don’t have those three things on any artwork, then it has no value.’

Paintings stolen from two of the most famous heists – at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 2010 – have yet to be recovered. So where could the paintings be?

‘It might be that people are sitting on them because they panicked and realised they couldn’t offer them back,’ said Ms Farren-Bradley.

‘It might be that they’re still moving around on the black market or at least between criminal communities, that they’re being used as collateral against other criminal enterprises like arms or drugs.

‘Hollywood does like to think they’re on the wall of some kind of secret collector in an underground lair but we’ve never ever come across anything close to that.

‘Most of the time they end up either with the less regulated end of the market – smaller auction houses, smaller dealers – or they’re with people who don’t really realise what they have.’

The FBI estimates that the illegal art trade costs about £3.7bn a year. Despite the huge sums involved, the public perception of art theft doesn’t always reflect the reality.

‘Sometimes people do think that it’s glamorous or just Thomas Crown types who worry about it, but it does unfortunately affect a lot of people,’ said Ms Farren-Bradley.

‘Whenever you have a domestic burglary there’s the risk that along with the DVD and the iPad you may find that the artwork’s taken off the wall as well. In those cases a lot of the time those pieces have just been passed down family member to family member.’

As for the paintings stolen this week, Mr Wittman is confident they will eventually turn up.

‘The great part of art theft is that these paintings have been here a lot longer than we have and they’re going to outlast us,’ he said.

‘The intrinsic value is not in the canvas and the paint – it’s in what they represent. In 50 years from now when they are back, this will just be a small insert in the history of the items.’